Legal & Regulatory News

Two rural Missouri hospitals remain closed as a slew of lawsuits and state and federal investigations grind forward.

The package of bills would also prohibit owners from taking out dividends within two years of an acquisition and limit a type of financing known as sale-leaseback transactions on hospitals’ real estate.

The Healthcare Ownership Transparency Act, which failed to move out of committee when introduced last year, would compel firms to list investors, debt, fees collected, and performance details.

“Substantial merger activity and signs of market concentration and related competition concerns have dramatically increased the pressure on staffing resources in recent years,” the commission said.

AppliedVR now holds the distinction of being the first company to make an immersive therapeutic to be included in an existing benefit category. And because Medicare now covers the platform, other payers may follow suit. 

In an accompanying letter to Congress, MedPAC Chair Michael Chernew, Ph.D., said “the Commission is acutely aware of how providers’ financial status and patterns of Medicare spending varied in 2020 and 2021 from historical trends, as well as the higher and more volatile increases in input costs for several health care sectors that occurred during 2022.”

In a filing with the court, attorneys representing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) as well as Minnesota and New York agreed to voluntarily dismiss their challenge to the $13 billion deal.

The Oak Street deal was CVS' third largest deal in the last decade.

Mena (Ark.) Regional Health System and Nashville, Ark.-based Howard Memorial Hospital are being sued for data breaches that affected 84,814 people in late 2021 and 53,668 patients in late 2022, respectively.

Proposed regulations come after demand for travel nurses surged to unprecedented levels during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.